Yesterday morning, M decided that he wanted to make me breakfast. Not just any breakfast...a break
feast as he called it. Breakfast foods are most easily my favorite kinds of foods: I would eat eggs and bacon for every meal if it were possible slash not weird.
We made a special trip to Whole Foods where Chester and I stayed in the car and M went in a did the shopping. He came out 15 minutes later with a mystery bag full of groceries...and I had no idea what he bought! The entire breakfast was a surprise.
I sat in the living room, drooling over
The Phantom Gourmet, while M slaved away in the kitchen. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting in front of my dream breakfast.
When we go out for breakfast, I have the hardest time choosing my breakfast meats...so M made both sausages and bacon! The sausages were
Wellshire Farms original pork sausages. I think the bacon was from Wellshire Farms too.
I love putting avocado on my eggs. We've recently become avocado obsessed: they're a great source of healthy, monounsaturated fats.
The main dish: Cheesy Eggs. Fried and scrambled eggs are a breakfast staple at our house...the cheese was our weekend indulgence.
M bought a whole pineapple and cut it into chunks. We're big on fruit in the mornings, but we usually eat berries of some sort. The pineapple was a tropical treat.
Breakfast is the best. For reals. I love waking up hungry for delicious breakfast foods. They say that eating breakfast is important because it helps boost your metabolism and it keeps you from overeating throughout the day. I like breakfast because it helps me get some protein in the A.M. and because there are so many different breakfast foods that I enjoy eating. Eating a healthy breakfast definitely keeps me on the healthy eating track for the rest of the day.
The Aerie (Eagle's Nest)
M2 built these stairs leading up to the house. One of his many Sisyphus Projects.
I've spent many hours scaling these rocks. Back in my college marine bio days, I could always be found searching for crabs in the seaweed.
The view.
The dinner table.
We started off the night with a boat ride to Crane's Beach and a tour of the harbor. The sun was setting when we got back and started working on dinner.
We nibbled on cheese and summer sausage. Okay, everyone else "nibbled", I feasted.
The vegetables.
Yellow tomato, regular tomato and avocado.
Cucumber salad made with cucumbers and fennel from my mother's garden in VT.
Cucumbers, fennel, and red onion mixed with some Bragg Healthy Vinaigrette.
M2 caught two lobsters that we boiled up and ate with melted butter.
Surf and Turf. To go along with the two lobsters, we grilled us some steak. There was also corn on the cobb, but I don't do "the cobb" part. I hate corn stuck in my teeth. Plus, there's a surprising amount of corn on one cobb. I shaved it all off, and ate a little less than half of what was on my plate.
For dessert, I had made a traditional carrot cake in honor of my mother's 32nd birthday (*wink wink*). I followed a recipe from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. I substituted coconut oil for the vegetable oil that the recipe called for, but that was the only change that I made. Well, the cream cheese frosting recipe called for 5 cups of confectioners sugar, which I decided would give me instant metabolic syndrome. So I only used one cup of sugar, and that was definitely sweet enough for me.
The cake was perfect, if I do say so myself. Not too sweet, and wonderfully coconutty.
It was a delectable dinner with wonderful company in a beautiful setting. Sharing quality time with my family is very important to me, especially because my two sets of parents live in a different state than my sister and I. It's always a treat when they come to visit: we get spoiled with homemade mama food and people telling us we look pretty and stuff. Sometimes one needs a good dose of parental doting-- even when they're in their late 20's....
